‘Showing off my map of Tasmania’: The Cultural Politics of Body Hair
List members may be interested in this free event taking place at the Birmingham Centre for Media & Cultural Research at Birmingham City University.
Date: 18th June 2014
Time: 14-16.00pm
Venue: Room 492, Parkside Campus, Millennium Point, Birmingham, B4
This month we welcome Dr Tracy Potts - Lecturer in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham and Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford and Dave Harte, Award Leader, MA Social Media, Birmingham City University.
Tracey's paper ‘Showing off my map of Tasmania’: The Cultural Politics of Body Hair explores the relationship between narratives of essentialism and choice in contemporary culture by examining a single bodily practice, body hair removal, which has been the subject of much controversy in recent years.
Whilst a critique of feminine bodily practices has been central to feminist politics and criticism, feminist theorists since the 1990’s have called into question the idea of a ‘natural’ female body. From Diana Fuss’ Essentially Speaking (1989) onwards, poststructural feminism, queer theory and postcolonial theory have been concerned with the deconstruction of essentialist discourses which position ‘woman’ as a unitary subject, and with the need for a recognition of difference. In this paper, however, I argue that the current resurgence of feminist media criticism has entailed a return of essentialist narratives in which the ‘natural’ body is imagined both as prior to culture, and as a utopian future state of being. This tendency represents a reaction against postfeminist narratives of ‘choice’ and ‘agency’ through which feminine practices were presented as intrinsically empowering, often in a way that failed to interrogate their racial, class and consumerist politics.
The paper reflects on these themes in contemporary feminism by drawing on body hair Tumblr blogs, online feminist networks, and the work of the musician and artist Amanda Palmer.
Dave's paper 'New Knowledge Networks in communities – the role of ‘hyperlocal’ media operations in facilitating everyday digital participation.' will report back on a project that looked at the complex online/offline between hyperlocal journalism practitioners and their communities. Using a case study in south Birmingham, it looks at the wider context of community news, examining its production culture and its potential as a form that promotes everyday digital participation by citizens, offering the potential for co-created ’spatial biographies'. The project has been funded by the Communities and Culture Network and involved partnership work with B31 Voices and Podnosh.
Full details and free registration at Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/showing-off-my-map-of-tasmania-the-cultural-politics-of-body-hair-registration-11868676531
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